BYOD Programs Essential to Business Success: Dell

By Nathan Eddy |
Posted 2013-01-24

Businesses need to embrace bring your own device (BYOD) or risk being left behind: That’s the indication based on the results of a a survey of nearly 1,500 IT decision makers across the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, Singapore, India, and the Beijing region by Dell Quest Software.

The findings indicated 70 percent of companies believe BYOD can improve their work processes and help them work better in the future, while 59 percent said they believe they would be at a competitive disadvantage without BYOD. On average, survey respondents identified four personal gains for their employees, including more flexible working hours, along with the ability to foster creativity, speed innovation, and facilitate teamwork/collaboration.

More than half (56 percent) of respondents said BYOD has completely changed their IT culture and, 54 percent said it has completely changed business culture in their organization. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) experienced improved employee productivity while an estimated 70 percent saw faster customer response times.

“We’re seeing dramatic changes in the way users interact with technology on their personal devices and the critical role BYOD plays in transforming business and IT culture. This global survey confirms what we have long suspected—companies that embrace a user-focused approach to BYOD may reap the biggest rewards, face the fewest obstacles and deliver real and immediate value in terms of greater efficiency, productivity and competitive advantage,” Dell Software Group’s enterprise mobility solutions director Roger Bjork said in a statement. “Those slow to support BYOD or constrained by a device-centric approach may deal with greater challenges, including the risk of being left behind from a competitive standpoint.”

Around three quarters of those surveyed said BYOD could only deliver benefits if the specific needs and rights of each user are understood, and just 17 percent of organizations encourage BYOD and actively manage any device employees wish to use. The two technology areas most commonly implemented first for BYOD are desktop virtualization and mobile device management (MDM).

The U.S., Beijing region and Australia represent the top three countries that encourage BYOD by actively managing and supporting any device that users want to bring into the corporate environment, while France, Germany and the U.K. were at the bottom in providing this level of support. Beijing, India and France were the top three locations to report that any BYOD support policies would require employees to ready their own devices for corporate use.

“In my previous role as CIO of Quest Software, our IT empowered nearly 4,000 employees across 60 offices in 23 countries to use their preferred mobile devices whether they were phones, tablets, or non-standard laptops to do their jobs. Instead of worrying about their devices, we focused on enabling access to the apps and data needed by the appropriate individuals regardless of device,” Dell Software Group CIO Carol Fawcett said in a statement. “We found this approach allowed us to be much more strategic and enabled us to focus on our biggest BYOD problems; security, access rights and data leakage. The results of this latest BYOD survey reinforce the importance of putting users first in order to develop the most effective policies and turn BYOD into a long-term, sustainable business benefit.”